Elements

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Fire Water Earth Air and Spirit

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I pressed my finger onto your lips, then let you taste it. The silence. Today I chose meditation, I didn't go to work. I disagreed with that as a prospect for myself. And I also chose to spend the whole day not thinking. Which resulted in this.

 

 

 

 

Water

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(Element,  the chance for love)

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I swam today, alone, it was the most beautiful and erotic thing. I watched dragonflies dance with each other and got my hand caught in some shrubs. River dancers, I call them, river dancer I also call myself. I was laughing, giggling to myself and I must have looked crazy, completely mad, or maybe no one noticed, probably no one did. I delight in that prospect. It shouts for me, the water, it calls me forever. It's funny because the last time I swam in the ocean I was with a boy I thought I was in love with, turns out I was not in love with him, I don't think, but at the time it was a possibility. I laugh at this now, because he always swam so far away from me when we would swim together, which was something we enjoyed doing and in fact was the very first thing I did with him. Yes, he would swim with me but at a distance, I used to think too much about it and got nervous, but as it turns out, when I asked him, it was so that he could piss in the water, and he didn't want me to feel it. Which made me feel very strange, but also made me laugh at how I thought it was because he didn't like me enough. Was it an act of kindness insead? Who knows, I guess I don't need to know now because that part of me is gone. And actually it's pretty gross and means nothing. But that day, I closed my eyes, I held my breath and let my ears sink into the ocean and floated for a little while, and I was totally alone, and I think that was the last time I felt peace without reason or consequence, because no matter what I did, if I opened my eyes, there was a boy who could of loved me, or I might of opened my eyes and he would of vanished. Leaving me floating alone.  No matter the outcome I was not present. I was the ocean itself for a short time, and my love was everlasting, and for free. He could have taken it if he wanted, he knew he could have, and he could have ran away with it. But instead he put his arms underneath me and helped me to float, to meditate. Now I have learnt that love can reside in wherever I choose to put it, instead of the boy I put it in the ocean, in me being the ocean.  After that we got on the train completely soaked, as we swam in our clothes, and he held my hand as I read. Not speaking but feeling and knowing. Then we got into his father's car, and I was terrified because the boy who helped me to float had actually vanished. He took nothing, just fled in the presence of myself sitting in the back seat trying to sound smart and like I had more money than I did and also like I would be a good mother, and like I had a mother of my own. 

 

 

 

 

Fire

 

(Element, what to do with desire and match sticks)

 

What caused this fire in my chest wasn't conventional but imprinted on me without reason. It changed everything. I saw the world upside down, I was both at the same time not afraid of anything but afraid of everything. And I was afraid of you, I didn't know how to communicate anymore, not like I used to, you had the matches. All I ever had was a pen.  I remember the irony of somethings you would say to me, in the back of my head I was laughing, but to you I was silent so the laughing was pointless. When I left your room one time I scraped my arm on your door. I  wanted to tell you that I was hurt but the door shut and you locked it. At least now there is a kind of beauty in it all. If I choose to look at it that way, if I choose to leave, or not, nothing changes. We can't take back what we did, I fear we have been but in this purgatory of desire and we can't escape it now, not really.  Now, I spend my days eating breakfast outside, and I put on my dress (not the one you liked)  and I walk. I walk for hours and waste the whole day walking, tricking myself that I'm walking away from myself, but I always come back. And I can always hear my own heartbeat. And the sun trails behind me every time wondering if I am lost, where am I going? I look up and reply “i don't know… i was hoping you was going to tell me”  One evening I said to my housemate, “there's never silence, there is always sound, and the birds will never stop chirping, so when are we not reminded of the constant drum of existence”  and she said “I think it's beautiful, life carries on no matter what. And you wouldn't like it if you couldn't hear at all” she is right.

 

 

 

 

Spirit

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(Element, how many spiritual awakenings does one get in a lifetime?)

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I think I am on my third, and conveniently they happen close to traumatic events, some smaller than others. And so I wonder if this is an unhealthy response of some kind. But I waste my life wondering, and as Lana Del Rey puts it, not all those who wonder are lost. And as my father might say, why care? If it makes you happy, However, I strongly believe I haven't, I believe in those cards. On my twentieth birthday I decided to get my tarot cards read for me for the first time. The cards didn't mention the thing that was most pressing for me at the time, but I did learn not to spend another birthday in Brighton again because each time I do I have a really difficult year followed by  an awakening of some kind. That's the thing, energy, it flows  so many different ways and is as vast as space itself. Some things aren't made for certain people, drugs and alcohol aren't made for me and spirituality isn't made for others. But anyway, I do wonder, if I am only twenty, and I have had three spiritual awakenings, how many more can I get? Do I require more? Or am I simply early to certain life events and that's just the way it is, and that's just the way the energy has flown in my direction. Brighton is no longer my favorite place, I don't have a favorite place anymore.

 

 

 

 

Air

 

(Element, a thousand ways to breathe)

 

Fear is a language I know so well. I remember when I was 17 years old, I was so sure I was going to die pretty soon, and so my father walked me through the woods in our hometown. He said that I should try hugging a tree, it was the first thing he said after we were walking in complete silence and I was just sobbing. And so I did, I hugged the tree, and I laughed a little through my tears, and he was so relieved that I managed to do that. He was very confused, but it was the most patience anyone has had with me, he wasn't embarrassed to be walking past people with a hyperventilating daughter attached to his arm, he wasn't scared either, he just wanted to understand, he just wanted me to tell him why i was so sure that death was out to get me. But I couldn't tell him because I didn't know that myself. For about a year after that i forgot how to breathe, i forgot how to live and what to live for, i forgot so many things, who i was, what i wanted, what to say, what to paint, how to eat. It felt like for that whole year I had run out of air, and was just waiting for nature to take  its course and wipe me out. But it didn't, because feelings are not the truth sometimes. I slowly learnt how to live again. I told myself to  read, it's the most vital role in this, read everything, not just books. Read street signs, read magazines, read posters, read the sky, read text messages over and over again, read poetry and novels definitely, read old birthday cards and old journals, menus and the ground you walk on. Never stop looking for answers to unanswerable questions. As Clarice Lispector put it in “The Hour of The Star”

“As long as i have questions and no answers i'll keep on writing” as long as i have questions and no answers i'll keep on living… and writing and living again. It's my first time living in this form, I just need to grow for a little longer.

 

 

 

 

Earth

 

(Element, the end and where we all end up)

 

No one in this world is indifferent to grass, we always come back to the dirt. The origin of this is the origin of all things, what makes us is nature. When I was a little girl, very small, I looked at some shrubs on the side of the road, they were telling me to believe in fairies. I was telling myself to believe in fairies. And so I made up a whole world of fairy people, me and my mother, they were called Lullabees, they were rockstar fairies with spiky hair and striped legs, then there were rock poppers and mud monsters, their companions. Rock poppers were creatures that would pop out of mountains and mud monsters were, well, monsters made out of mud. And so ever since I can remember the earth has been the origin of everything i have created, and thankfully i never abandoned it. I am excited to go back, to crawl inside the womb of earth once again, naked with long wild hair, to let my soul rest and to become the wind itself.  To become the spirit whispering to little girls to believe in fairies.